I spent a good deal of money on a nice processor and now it's going to get nerfed by at least 20%? I guess it's good they found the bug before it became common knowledge.

Ehm, no. The 20-30 percent number is only for tests that were made to have a lot of the affected operations, and unless you're running virtual machines you're not going to have anything near that.
For real life applications and gaming the difference is more 0 - 4 percent...
which still sucks, but less so.

I do not understand which Intel processors this applies to.
If it is written somewhere, I fail to see it

-fox

Long story short: all of them
At least the ones built in the last ten years.

Well then, my CPU was officially presented on 8 January 2007, which makes its design 11 years old -- if not a tad more.

With such an old CPU I was caressing the idea of upgrading -- right in these days, in fact. Lucky me: I kept postponing it because the motherboard also needs to change (because socket).
I was eyeing a modern i7 8th gen, but in light of these news I suppose that AMD makes very nice processors too...

I do not understand which Intel processors this applies to.
If it is written somewhere, I fail to see it

-fox

Long story short: all of them
At least the ones built in the last ten years.

Well then, my CPU was officially presented on 8 January 2007, which makes its design 11 years old -- if not a tad more.

With such an old CPU I was caressing the idea of upgrading -- right in these days, in fact. Lucky me: I kept postponing it because the motherboard also needs to change (because socket).
I was eyeing a modern i7 8th gen, but in light of these news I suppose that AMD makes very nice processors too...

-fox

Dont take my 10years figure as hard data.
Im just interpreting what i read in other articles.

Apparently, Meltdown is the intel-specific CPU flaw - but Spectre has raised its ugly head too:

Spectre potentially has a wider reach. It affects some chips in smartphones, tablets and computers powered by Intel, ARM and AMD. It is thought to be much harder to patch and no fix for it has yet been made widely available.

Knowledge is a deadly friend, if no one sets the rules
The fate of all mankind, I see, is in the hands of fools

Apparently, Meltdown is the intel-specific CPU flaw - but Spectre has raised its ugly head too:

Spectre potentially has a wider reach. It affects some chips in smartphones, tablets and computers powered by Intel, ARM and AMD. It is thought to be much harder to patch and no fix for it has yet been made widely available.